Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Matthew 28:20
September 11 is a date whose imprint on our national consciousness will take generations to fade. But it’s September 10 that stays with me somehow. It’s just the other side of a line of demarcation, perhaps the last day of an era.
September 10, 2001, was a perfect late-summer day, like the infamous day that would follow. New Yorkers went about their business, absorbed by the daily trials and rewards of life in the city. I took a good friend to lunch for her birthday. We groused that the restaurant had run out of the crab cakes we’d wanted to order. How could they? The baseball pennant races were on, important enough to make the front pages of the tabloids. The last thing I did that day at work was to make plane reservations for a business trip the following week. I didn’t give it a second thought. Why should I?
Since then, nothing has been quite the same. But on that September 10–on any day of my life, really–I could not possibly have known what the future held. I am not given that knowledge. That’s what stays with me about this day, haunts me even–the complete uncertainty of tomorrow.
Yet I am given a knowledge far greater than the ability to see the future. I know, with the utmost certainty, that whatever unlooked-for events the next day may bring, God is with me, today, tomorrow and forever.
Lord, Your love and protection is the one true thing that I can count on. It’s always ahead of me, guiding my way through all uncertainty.
